What Would a Hacker Do? (Part Deux)
I found an interesting article from Daniel @ benzadryne.cx attacking the spam issue from an economic perspective. This is not going to be a technical discussion; instead it will focus on the creative approach to solving the problem at hand.
The Problem
Spam is a complex problem, stemming from the following issues:
- Spam is anonymous as well as being fast, easy, and cheap to send.
- Blocking spam is slow, difficult, expensive, and difficult to organize on a large scale.
- Any effective spam defense can be overcome with enough time and energy.
- 99% of spam is unwanted by its recipients, who have to pay for it.
- 1% of spam is wanted, and this response rate is high enough to justify more spam.
- It is not uncommon for regular email to be accidentally blocked as spam, which aggravates customers to no end.
- People who send spam make a lot of money.
Yuck.
The Current Solution
This is quite a concern for email providers, as they have to make their customers happy. So, an entire industry (one even might say a subculture) has sprung up to try and solve the problem. So far, all the approaches have been around trying to block spam, either at the server or the client level. This has worked to make sure customers don’t see spam, but they still have to pay for it indirectly, through the systems that do the actual filtering.
Now, this isn’t bad for a first try, the thing is we are just treating the symptoms and not the disease. We don’t need to make our customers happy by making spam invisible, we need to do it by making spam go away. Nice thought, you say. How do we actually do that? If any effective counter measure can be overcome with time, then that route is just a short term fix.
The only other way to attack the problem is to make spam unprofitable.
The Creative Solution
What Daniel has suggested is to make it so that it takes hours (or more) for known spammers to try and send a single piece of mail. Thus, they can send less mail and make less money, making that activity less attractive to the unsavory elements. The technical details aren’t as important as the fresh approach to the problem. He has looked at the root cause of the problem and attacked it with simple and innovative approach that looks very promising.
Why You Should Care
Once again, this is a great example of how we can learn from the hacking community . Every organization has a problem like this one that seems insurmountable. A problem that is complicated, technical and personal, and every solution that has been tried so far has failed.
The way to start trying to solve a difficult problem is to:
- Determine the root cause(s).
- Attack the problem at the root cause.
- Find a solution that works on the smallest possible scale.
- Make the solution work on that scale.
- Demonstrate the solution to others.
- Help make the solution work on a larger scale.
- Share the credit.
